


In This Unsheltered Place

by toujours_nigel



Series: Party Verse [1]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-17
Updated: 2012-02-17
Packaged: 2017-10-31 07:50:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sandy died in the interstices of an air-raid Laurie registered only as blurred chaos beyond the black-out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In This Unsheltered Place

Sandy died in the interstices of an air-raid Laurie registered only as blurred chaos beyond the black-out. He slept fitfully, waking once to have Ralph steer him gently towards sleep, and again to hear his voice pitched low in the next room. The planes had gone by then and the night felt painfully quiet. He strained to distinguish the words, but Ralph was indistinct through the door and it felt, unaccountably, like an invasion not to be borne to listen to his midnight conversations.

He hadn't much longer to wait, and Ralph, padding into the room, smiled momentarily at the sight of him awake—a flash of rueful affection illumining a grim mask. “Go back to sleep, Spud; that's it for me, and you'll have to be up and about in an hour yourself.” They had taken lately to sleeping with all the lights on, after a moment of groping for his cane in the darkness had left Laurie's knee needing a week of therapy before it would consent to function again. It was impossible to know whether the day had grown brighter beyond the black-outs. “It's half-six,” Ralph said, arresting his glance, “that isn't it. It was Alec on the phone; it's Sandy, he was nearly home by the time the raid started, and he thought...”

Distantly, and with the strange formality of a wake, Laurie said, “He never did like sitting in the shelters; it's how we met. You're going to see Alec?”

He nodded. “Terrible business, how they let him find out, not that they knew better. If I can't get hold of Theo I'll bring him here. Get some sleep, Spuddy, or we'll all be dead on our feet soon enough.”

After that it was impossible to sleep, though he feigned dutifully till Ralph started down the stairs and rousted himself out of bed only as the car sounded on its way down the street. How must Alec feel, and how callously must the news have been given him, like an item of gossip? It barely bore thinking of, even only the news that Sandy was dead. That most, that he was dead and drained and gone.

***

He'd just about got the tea going and the black-outs down when Ralph shouldered the door carefully open and ushered Alec in. He came in quietly, and sat down quietly on the heinous sofa, and looked quietly at his feet. Ralph stalked to the stove, poured out a half-cup of tea and fumbled in the drawers beneath it for a moment before filling the cup with rum.

“The hospital's telling his parents?”

Alec shook his head, came a little to life. “If you can arrange for Alice to call and tell them, that'd be best.”

“They still think she's sweet on him, don't they?” He put the cup in Alec's hands and rose again, making plainly for the telephone.

“They do make a striking pair,” Alec said, and, with an effort painful to see, “did make. They made a striking pair, you can't blame his parents for it.” Ralph, already dialing, tossed him a peremptory glance and a tilt of the head. Laurie, duly chastened and feeling entirely at a loss, moved to take the seat beside Alec. “He told me, you know, that when they were both still in school, they'd decided to see whether they could make a go of it, but it all came to nothing, of course. I've never even thought of it, really, all a bit distasteful.”

Ralph said, “Yes, Miss Stephens, if you don't mind,” and pressed the receiver to his chest for a moment to say, “ I did it for two years, might've gone on longer if I hadn't met you,” before listening intently again to the phone.

Alec said, quite with his usual self-mockery, “Because I was so entirely irresistible, yes, thank you, my dear,” and added conspiratorially, “he used to tell Sandy that old story every time he wanted to annoy him. Hell of a month, I had.”

Ralph sighed at the telephone and said, settling it in its cradle, “I lived with them just after Dunkirk, Spuddy. Alec, I can't get through to her, I'll run down myself in another hour, you should be in bed.”

“I would if you hadn't kidnapped me.”

“Don't insult my intelligence.” He shot between them both a prefectly look that Laurie recognised with a certain ache, and Alec appeared not to see. “My dear, you cannot possibly have thought...” The phone rang insistently. They had a system whereby it was always Ralph who received calls—too much trouble to explain to his superiors, who had grown steadily more paranoid about security over the months; it was only ever his mother who called Laurie, and she was always happy to chat with The Lanyon.

Alec closed his eyes and let his head slump forward and his shoulders fold down. He looked, Laurie thought clinically, like a man with his face to the wall, who wanted the world to leave him in peace for a little while. For all that they resembled each other as little as possible, he looked like Reg in the wake of Madge leaving.

Ralph said, briskly, “Yes, of course, sir,” and rang off. “I've to go, there's something... well, something. Alec, go to bed, please. Spud?”

He trailed Ralph obediently into the bedroom, watching him slip into the uniform jacket and straighten looking vaguely unfamiliar, all his edges sharper. “I'll manage him,” he said before Ralph could speak. “Has he had anything to eat?”

“Shouldn't think it,” he said, and in the shadow of the door pulled him impulsively close for a moment. “My dear.”

***

The day passed strangely. Alec consented with ill-grace to be put to bed, only to wander out in three hours and sit by the window staring unseeingly out. He ate the sandwich Laurie handed him and gulped at regular intervals from the carafe of water and stayed still and small on the ledge, his legs tucked under him.

Laurie, staring at his notes, at the texts he should remember but found almost new when he looked through them, felt himself inefficient and helplessly young. Once, when the fact that Sandy was dead hit him with inescapable force—not the blunt raw fact of it, but his eyes and his smile and his endless adoration of Alec and the gaping absence of it that hardly seemed real—he walked as rapidly as he could manage to the bedroom and allowed himself a minute behind the closed door, his hand tight around the door-knob. When he came back he could feel Alec's eyes on him, dark and swallowing.

He had been young when his father died, and his mother had smiled tightly and gone about her day and never let Laurie see her crying. It had been soon after his birthday, and he had had Gyp and he had gone on long walks without number and put a good deal of energy into not thinking about his father in the ground gently rotting. During the chaos that was his brief stint in the war it had been impossible to think about anything less than immediate and then, in the long stretch of hesitant recovery it had been easy to not think about the men who died around him, who he had never known for more than a stretch of weeks. Even Gyp had been dead and done, his end managed by other hands. He had never had to think of this, of putting into the ground a man he'd seen talking and laughing and dancing—Sandy and Alec had danced, without music playing or frenetic crowds and he'd caught Ralph looking at them with a soft reminiscent smile—and stripped of all defenses and with his back to the wall; a man he'd loved and held in his arms and watched sleeping. He thought of Andrew dead, his face marred and smile disfigured; of Ralph in uniform, marmoreal as in sleep, his fair hair a burnished helmet, those eyes snapped closed and never to open again, his skin cold to the touch and all that formidable potential for love and command shut away under the earth.

***

  
By the time Ralph returned they had put up the black-outs, Alec shaking out of his stupor to neatly do much of the work with an efficient rapidity Laurie couldn't summon to his stiff limbs.

He got to the door, too, while Laurie was swaying to his feet, and they stood for a moment there, with their eyes locked.

“Spud,” Ralph said, voice pitched low and clashingly-loud, “go for a walk before you stiffen up.”

The city outside was cool after staying all day shut up in a room, and the stairs had not been too difficult, after all, and the cigarette he shouldn't be smoking did much to ease the rippling disquiet of having passed them in the doorway, Alec's fingers clutched around the lapel of Ralph's jacket, Ralph's hand shaped to Alec's hip, very nearly holding him up. A familiarity of flesh, there, recollected in a shock of touch; dead and done and friends. It was still wretched to stand in the street smoking and putting a deal of effort into not thinking of the close comforts that needed him absent. It had been the second thing he had known about Alec—that he loved Sandy, and that he had loved Ralph, and that he was conscious that the differences between the two only elevated Ralph.

***

The door had been left ostentatiously open for him. Under the harsh light Alec and Ralph sat crushed close on the sofa, Alec's face buried in the crook of Ralph's shoulder, Ralph's left hand carding through his hair, both their eyes closed and chests rising and falling in the slow rhythm of sleep. Ralph's jacket lay on the table, coiled around an empty fifth of rum.

Laurie stood for a moment watching, blinking his eyes shut and then open again. As if in calculated response Ralph's eyes slitted open, and he unfurled his free hand outwards.


End file.
